Agricultural vehicles are normally provided with multiple various cooling units for removing the heat rejected during the operation. Usually the cooling units are arranged in the form of a cooler stack located in an engine compartment arranged one behind the other in the common cooling air flow. Contaminants drawn in from the surroundings of the vehicle by the cooling air flow could be deposited on the surface of the cooling unit and thereby impair their cooling ability. Since, above all, the interior cooling units of the cooler stack are not immediately accessible from the outside and therefore cannot be cleaned without difficult disassembly of the vehicle cooling system, the cleaning or maintenance cost is correspondingly high.
Various procedures for circumventing this problem are known from the state of the art. The publication EP 0 956 024 B1 discloses a radiator or cooler assembly consisting of several cooling units for an agricultural utility vehicle. The cooling units, in each case, form a common air intake chamber consisting of several side components, where the air intake chamber is provided with a frame structure supporting the cooling units. One of the cooling units is fastened to a forward part of the frame structure that can be pivoted to the side. Since all of the cooling units are accessible from the outside as well as from the inside—by pivoting the forward part of the frame structure—, the necessary cleaning and maintenance operations can be performed without complicated disassembly of the vehicle cooling system.
Furthermore, a sales brochure for a mobile excavator M318D manufactured by Caterpillar, shows a cooling system in which a blower assembly and a coolant condenser of an air conditioning system of the mobile excavator are retained in such a way that these can be pivoted upward from a generally horizontal operating position into a maintenance position accessible from the outside, so that both sides of the blower assembly and the coolant condenser can be cleaned.
Because of the limited space available typically in an engine compartment, these known solutions are not appropriate for pivoting cooling units in a cooler stack in an engine compartment.